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Cross-country public consultations on the future of the post office held in Toronto on Tuesday.

Post offices in rural and remote locations play a vital role for small communities, serving as community hubs, hearings into the future of Canada Post heard on Tuesday. (Andrew Vaughan / THE CANADIAN PRESS FILE PHOTO)

If Canada Post is pinning its future on growth in parcel delivery, one Toronto bookstore owner says the pricing model desperately needs to be updated and simplified.

“E-commerce is not going away,” Gary Kirk told members of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates as it held a hearing on Tuesday in Toronto as part of cross-country public consultations on the future of the post office.

“The sad reality is Canada Post has been more of an obstacle,” he said.

“When you sell something online, you have no way of predicting how much it will cost to mail,” said Kirk, who starting selling rare and used books as a hobby two decades ago, and opened A Good Read Bookstore on Roncesvalles Ave. seven years ago.

Because Canada Post calculates the price of shipping based on weight, dimensions and the volume of traffic at both the originating postal code and destination postal code, Kirk said prices could vary widely – from about $10 within Toronto to as much as $35 to Canmore, Alta., though he said his business would be eligible for a discount of about 20 per cent.

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As a result, he tends to overcharge for local shipping and then loses on shipping to faraway or more obscure places in the hopes it evens out in the end.

By contrast, flat pricing models exist in the United States and Australia. Shipping a book in the U.S. would be about $3 (U.S.) anywhere in the country, he said, but would cost $12 to ship across the street in Canada.

And if shipping the book from the U.S. to Canada, it would be about $15 (U.S.), not counting volume discounts, so it would be cheaper to mail a book from Hawaii to Canmore than from Toronto, Kirk said.

Canada Post confirmed its pricing model, but said its prices are favourable compared to the competition.

Kirk's comments came as more than a dozen people appeared before the committee, some with advice on how to reform the post office’s pension plan or how to make Canada Post a more environmentally responsible company.

Others represented disabled and seniors’ groups lobbying for the restoration of door-to-door delivery. As part of cost-cutting measures, Canada Post began switching customers to community mailboxes in 2014, but the conversions were halted last October just as the federal Liberals were set to take power.

The Liberals have since appointed a task force to review Canada Post’s operations, and the task force just released a discussion paper on ways to modernize the post office that included everything from raising revenues from delivering marijuana to alternate-day mail delivery to cut costs.

“We do not support alternate-day delivery,” said Patrick Bartlett, executive director of National Association of Major Mail Users, which represents big companies like the banks and Rogers. “Having control of when your product is going to be delivered to Canadians is important, whether it is advertising, an invoice or magazine.”

Bartlett argued that parcels would still continue to be delivered on a daily basis, but separating mail from parcels would add complexity, creating greater chances for mistakes, as well as make it more costly because there would be two systems.

But Dan Kelly, president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, welcomed different options, saying alternate-day delivery might open up other opportunities such as same-day delivery, already available in some cities, or weekend delivery.

“Canada Post’s mandate is not dead. It’s changing,” he said, adding different ideas that could “potentially grow the pie rather than watch it shrink.”

Benjamin Dachis, associate director of research for the C.D. Howe Institute, urged the lifting of the current ban on closing 3,600 post offices in rural Canada, saying the services could be provided at a lower cost by franchise outlets such as Shoppers Drug Mart.

He noted that some of the locations designated rural are no longer rural – including Brampton and Richmond Hill.

Lynn Dollin, president of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, argued that the post offices in rural and remote locations play a vital role for small communities, bringing residents into town, which can serve as an economic development tool.

“They are community hubs. They are essential to small town Ontario. That’s where you find out who died, and who has had a baby,” she said.

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